Neuroscience Program, Center Health Science, SRI International, Menlo Park, CA, USA.
Neuropsychopharmacology. 2013 Sep;38(10):1844-53. doi: 10.1038/npp.2013.102. Epub 2013 Apr 24.
Alcohol dependence is associated with impaired control over emotionally motivated actions, possibly associated with abnormalities in the frontoparietal executive control network and midbrain nodes of the reward network associated with automatic attention. To identify differences in the neural response to alcohol-related word stimuli, 26 chronic alcoholics (ALC) and 26 healthy controls (CTL) performed an alcohol-emotion Stroop Match-to-Sample task during functional MR imaging. Stroop contrasts were modeled for color-word incongruency (eg, word RED printed in green) and for alcohol (eg, BEER), positive (eg, HAPPY) and negative (eg, MAD) emotional word content relative to congruent word conditions (eg, word RED printed in red). During color-Stroop processing, ALC and CTL showed similar left dorsolateral prefrontal activation, and CTL, but not ALC, deactivated posterior cingulate cortex/cuneus. An interaction revealed a dissociation between alcohol-word and color-word Stroop processing: ALC activated midbrain and parahippocampal regions more than CTL when processing alcohol-word relative to color-word conditions. In ALC, the midbrain region was also invoked by negative emotional Stroop words thereby showing significant overlap of this midbrain activation for alcohol-related and negative emotional processing. Enhanced midbrain activation to alcohol-related words suggests neuroadaptation of dopaminergic midbrain systems. We speculate that such tuning is normally associated with behavioral conditioning to optimize responses but here contributed to automatic bias to alcohol-related stimuli.
酒精依赖与情绪动机行为的控制受损有关，可能与额顶执行控制网络和与自动注意相关的奖励网络的中脑节点的异常有关。为了确定与酒精相关的词刺激的神经反应差异，26 名慢性酒精依赖者（ALC）和 26 名健康对照组（CTL）在功能磁共振成像期间执行了酒精情绪 Stroop 匹配样本任务。Stroop 对比用于颜色词不一致（例如，用绿色印刷的单词 RED）和酒精（例如，BEER）、正性（例如，HAPPY）和负性（例如，MAD）情绪词内容相对于一致词条件（例如，用红色印刷的单词 RED）。在颜色 Stroop 处理过程中，ALC 和 CTL 表现出相似的左背外侧前额叶激活，而 CTL 但不是 ALC 激活了后扣带回皮层/楔前叶。交互作用揭示了酒精词和颜色词 Stroop 处理之间的分离：与处理颜色词相比，ALC 对处理酒精词时激活了中脑和海马旁回区域，比 CTL 更多。在 ALC 中，中脑区域也被负性情绪 Stroop 词激活，从而显示出这种与酒精相关和负性情绪处理的中脑激活的显著重叠。增强的中脑对酒精相关词的激活表明多巴胺能中脑系统的神经适应。我们推测，这种调整通常与行为条件有关，以优化反应，但在这里，它有助于对酒精相关刺激的自动偏见。
